Menial Labor Quotes

Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an eyebrow. "Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

Men like Abraham Lincoln recognized that if the slaveholders were not stopped, it would only be a question of time until they spread their system of elite rule to the entire country. Poor men would be bound for life into menial labor, and American democracy would die.

For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

I'd find it demeaning to be cleaning toilets.

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.

I had rather tug at the oar than to occupy such a place.

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

I don’t buy the argument that there are certain jobs that American just will not do.

No white man at the South serves another as his body servant to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform menial services in his household!”

I cleaned toilets and shined shoes.

No white man, in a slaveholding community, was the menial servant of anyone.

Drudgery is one of the finest touchstones of character there is. Drudgery is work that is very far removed from anything to do with the ideal - the utterly mean grubby things; and when we come in contact with them we know instantly whether or not we are spiritually real.

If there's nothing for me to do as an actress, then that's frustrating. I'd rather go work at a menial labour job, where I can actually get my hands dirty.

In all social systems there must be a class to do the mean duties... It constitutes the very mudsills of society...Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to the purpose...We use them for that purpose and call them slave.

There is no surer token of a little mind than to imagine that anything in the way of physical labor is dishonoring.

Thus the labour of a manufacture adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his masters profits. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing.

It is an intern's job to go for coffee for anyone who asks, preferably delivering it scalding hot and cupped in your bare hands!

I'd rather break stones on the king's highway than hem a handkerchief.

Let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace.

I could scrape water off horses all day long. That would never get boring.

The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.